In 1995, the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made a wealth of minute by minute flight tracking information available for distribution to the public with the creation of the Aircraft Situation Display to Industry (ASDI) service. Through this service, flight tracking data is made available to several vendors who are subsequently able to provide information in a value-added format to their users or subscribers. The ASDI information includes the location, altitude, airspeed, origin, destination, estimated time of arrival and tail number or designated identifier of air carrier and general aviation aircraft operating on at least the corresponding IFR flight plans within U.S. airspace. General aviation VFR flights that include air traffic control flight following are often included. In addition, other sources of flight tracking information are available, including automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B) information, which may be utilized independently or in combination with the ASDI data to provide the requested flight tracking information.
Traditional subscribers to such a service include flight departments, charter operators, limousine firms, airframe and power plant manufacturers, air carriers, fixed base operators (FBOs), research firms, and other users. Additionally, users may include business travelers, vacationers, friends and family of travelers, and anyone interested in obtaining flight tracking information
With the advent of this type of service, a number of users and subscribers were able to obtain valuable flight information and increase the efficiency and reliability of their own services. However, many services, such as websites, who provide flight tracking information to the public do so on a static basis, in that updating is only accomplished via a refresh requested on the user's device. For example, a husband interested in tracking the progress of his wife's flight must either refresh the website periodically or otherwise configure the browser to frequently poll the flight information service. Conversely, a typical update request is processed by known flight information services as a new request, thereby requiring equal processing power for each update as that required to process the initial request. For example, with each update, a new map, flight path, and the like must be generated and sent to the user, which requires significant processing and bandwidth, particularly when multiplied by thousands of requests occurring each and every minute. The present invention solves a number of these problems as well as other problems present in the aviation information industry, as are illustrated in the descriptions that follow.